Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling

TWENTY-ONE

Future Adaptations

In describing the visual effects of “an old Pathé Film from France”¹ in which books, dishes, clothing, carpets, and furniture transport themselves magically on Moving Day, the poet and critic Vachel Lindsay wrote in 1915, “The ability to do this kind of a thing is fundamental in the destinies of the art.”² Lindsay criticized Moving Day (France, 1908)³ as crassly lacking “the touch of the creative imagination,”⁴ like other films that are “mere voodooism.”⁵ Over a hundred years later, we can see his critique of Moving Day reverberate in many of the visual effects-driven blockbusters of today, and wish that earlier producers had taken heed:

A picture that is all action is a plague, one that is all elephantine and pachydermatous ...